"Science Fiction" means—to us—everything found in the science fiction section of a bookstore, or at a science fiction convention, or amongst the winners of the Hugo awards given by the World Science Fiction Society. This includes the genres of science fiction (or sci-fi), fantasy, slipstream, alternative history, and even stories with lighter speculative elements. We hope you enjoy the broad range that SF has to offer.

The Turn

Tara Isabella Burton's fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Arc, PANK, Shimmer and more. She has also written for National Geographic Traveler, The Paris Review Daily, The Atlantic, and The BBC. She has recently completed a novel.

Miles is an empath. "Gets it from his father," says his mother. "Always all about him."

I tell her she can trust me.

My references are excellent. I speak French. I know the Vineyard. I spent two years looking after little Stuart Farnsworth, who could shatter china with his mind, and in all that time, the press never once caught on.

"It's gotten worse since the separation."

I tell her I know how to fix him.

Miles is ten. He plays Haydn. He wears bow ties. Sometimes he tries to claw his own face off. He rocks back and forth in the middle of the room, with his little arms around his littler knees, and shouts obscenities at the floor.

I sit in the corner and think happy thoughts, and sometimes they distract him. I think of sheep, or dancing elephants, or what would happen if the ten-foot clock face at FAO Schwarz came to life, and when he starts to giggle I know that it's working.

I tell his mother to go out shopping. Too many thoughts will clutter up his head. She's visibly relieved.

"Whatever's best for Miles." She's already out the door.

She does not come home until ten. Miles and I teach each other games while we wait. I ask him to guess what I'm feeling.

"Now you're happy, Nanny. You're hungry. You want ice cream." He chirps through the gaps in his teeth. "Now you want to play hide-and-seek."

He knows I know he'll find me.

When his father comes, on alternate weekends, I stand right outside the nursery door and think of all the beautiful things I have seen that day on my way to work. I think about the squirrels tumbling over each other in Central Park, about the red and gold tulips that burst out of the sidewalk on Park Avenue, about the dancing elephants in the window at FAO Schwarz.

I don't think about the commute, the blisters on my feet, the men who grope me on the subway or the rent I can't afford. I think in clouds of pink and blue, and sometimes I think it works.

One day I cannot fix him.

His mother has returned early from her shopping; his father has arrived three hours late and lingered. They meet one another on the stair.

I do not hear their voices, but I hear his.

He sobs and screams and strikes me with a blow that would break my jaw, if his fists were any bigger than clementines.

"Asshole. Betrayer. Cunt."

I have to hold him down.

I have to think in pink and blue. I have to pretend I don't hate them.

At first, I think he does not notice. When I hobble in, with my blistering feet, when the cash in the envelope is forty dollars short and his mother has left early for her shopping and left Miles, shivering in piss-stained pajamas, to pick up on the mewing of the cat and start scratching the moldings for mice, when his father hasn't bothered to show up at all, I smile and think as hard as I can about dancing elephants. I think about how beautiful his mother is, and how fine is the shade of her lipstick, and how his father must be a very determined man, indeed, to have the success he has had, not to notice an envelope that's forty dollars short. I invent ways to love them.

It is only when his mother raps on the doorframe with those dinosaur nails of hers and scoops him up into her arms; it is only when he spits in her face that I know what I have done.

We play our game again.

"You're feeling weird, Nanny. You think you should feel bad, but you don't feel bad. You feel good, Nanny. You feel really good."